TMNT: Until Yesterday Is Here
by princessebee
Summary: A series of SAINW ficlets. Moody, morbid and morose. Warnings for language, drug use and implied sexual stuff.
1. Donatello

**Until Yesterday is Here**

It impressed him, the level of command she held; not just over the ragtag army that had persisted, but over herself.

But then, she'd always had a gracious poise, even in her younger years. A way of carrying herself that displayed her dignity and sense of self-respect, quiet and cool but always there.

Of course, it had an altogether different timbre now.

Now it seemed like a shell. Something hard and brittle she'd peeled around her some day long ago that had fused with her flesh – once soft and supple and warm, he remembered – giving her a brutal, propped up look. She'd just started training with weights – no, not _just_ – thirty years ago, thirty years ago when he'd been talking to her on his computer, before – before - just started and she was still soft, but now she was cut; hard and wiry muscle wrapped around her arms and broadening her shoulders, veins licking beneath her flesh as though they might burst through.

He could think of nothing to say to her now that they were alone. Together they silently loaded the ammunition onto the exo-suit that was once a Karai Legion Bot and he watched her. Nothing more than a film of sadness had crossed over the armour she wore as her face when she'd told him of Casey's fate. Nothing but a twinge of regret over Raphael and Leonardo's falling out. And though she'd smiled when she saw him, and put her arms around him, it had felt strangely distant. Like she herself had been looking on even as she'd performed these actions. Like the emotion was too savage for her to engage with it.

It unnerved him, and broke his heart at once.

He remembered her openness – was it really thirty years ago – it seemed like – it _was_ just – yesterday – how ready she was to laugh or to hug them or to tease. This woman with her chopped, grey hair – how those amber strands had blazed in the light his monitor once threw – and her lined, sharp face with its utter composure. Perfectly still and perfectly drawn.

She sighed, lifting her canon from its shelf, a shelf that had once housed books, loading it in readiness for the battle ahead. How strange it seemed to him, his tech-geek April who'd happily sat side by side with him, cordon of laptops propped up around them in a race to debug or decode, here expertly managing lethal weapons as though she had all her life.

And, he supposed, thirty years was a longer time than twenty-five.

Reflexively, as she finished locking the canon chamber, he moved to help her lift it, but before he could reach she had hauled it upwards and onto her shoulder, her legs braced and holding her cemented in place as she tested its weight. Satisfied, she eased it back down, her fingertips lingering like a pat on the iron barrel for a moment before she turned back towards the door.

"April – " he'd spoken before he realised he would, his own fingertips outstretched towards her and she turned and looked at him with something that resembled inquiry, like a mask she'd slipped over her features.

He moved towards her, aware that the naked look on his face was unsettling her, that she sensed the intensity of his emotion and was fighting the urge to run from it. When he reached out and took her arm, she twitched violently and for the first time he saw a flicker of fear in her eyes, their once vivid green dulled to the horrors that wrenched violently all around her.

"April, I never told you before. I didn't think it was necessary. " She fell back from him and he watched the shell that encased her like a second skin ripple before hardening further, tightening her features all the more. He reflected on his former self, the teenager of thirty years ago – no, the teenager he still _was_ – how that boy would never say to the woman he so – – so –

"I love you. I've _always_ loved you. I think – I always will."

And maybe the April of thirty years ago would've misunderstood him and smiled and said, "Oh Donnie, I love you too!" She'd said it to them so often and so easily, and he would've been faced with the choice between explaining himself or letting it go. Probably letting it go.

But this April, with all that she had endured rubbing out the brightness of her hair, the sparkle in her eye, understood him immediately.

The shell cracked and splintered, but before it slid away completely she had fallen forward and wrapped her arms around his neck, her face bowed to his shoulder. The feel of her skin on his was papery, her hair scratchy and blunt on his cheek and as her body sagged against him, his arms moved to prop her up and he felt the frailty of her ribs poking through her undernourished flesh, a disturbing contrast to the wiry density of her musculature.

Then he felt her body begin to shake as she cried, and he shut his eyes and held her.


	2. Michelangelo

**Until Yesterday is Here**

The pain was back. Splintering and white hot. His teeth clenched tight together and he hissed outwards.

The trees were upside down, their broken and bare branches gently probing a smoky red and black earth, their roots buried deep in the raw grey of a grassy sky. His right arm reached up towards an anchoring surface of rough stone as his feet hovered in open air, unable to find purchase, the stub of his left arm waving into the empty space around it, balancing him.

The pain blistered through him again and he set his jaw and sank upwards.

His elbow bent and he felt the pressure of his whole body upon that one joint, the sudden bulge of musculature along his arm and shoulder, splitting outwards around his chest and back. _Two hundred and five…_ his arm shook and abruptly he flipped back onto his feet, the world rightening itself again.

It was the pain. The pain had stopped him again. Even now it persisted in a vicious ache that throbbed all the way down his left shoulder, pulsed through his muscles and pooled relentlessly in his fingertips.

Except that he had no fingertips, no hand. Nothing below the elbow at all.

But the pain was _there_.

Savage. He could feel it all down the length of his non-existent forearm, burning his wrist and his hand, tingling in each finger. So present, even after all this time.

He growled and swatted at the air below the stump, where the fixed metal brace protected the ugly, closed over and useless half-limb. Nothing. There was nothing there. No arm, no hand, no fingertips.

But still the pain persisted.

He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the hand he still had, feeling the twitch in the muscles there from the marathon set of one-armed handstand push-ups he'd just forced out of himself. With the disadvantage of a missing arm, it was vital his other arm be at absolute peak, that his whole _body_ was more than able to compensate.

Vaguely, he remembered Splinter drilling into them as twelve year olds that being able to do all feats one handed was not only useful, it was _crucial_. The hours of agony in one-handed push-ups, trembling and collapsing onto the dusty cement of the lair, one-handed chin-ups, grip slipping and falling to the ground, hard on his tail. Balancing awkwardly on one hand only for his legs to go tipping back over his head. Hand-standing against the wall and lowering himself towards the ground on one hand, the fingertips of the other pressed so lightly against the brick wall, just enough to support him, and Splinter wrapping the knuckles of it sharply with his walking stick, scolding him that was cheating.

Splinter… he turned around to the stake that marked his Father's grave and bowed slowly, one hand pressed against his thigh, eyes lowered to the dead grass.

As he righted himself again another lash of pain whipped through him and he swallowed against the cry that burst from his throat, clutching his left shoulder tight in an effort to subdue it.

Turning, he moved through what was left of Central Park, towards the burrow he used to sleep in, a burned out shell of a below-ground apartment – the basement of what had once been April's building. She had offered him a place in the library her meagre rebellion army had converted to a base. But although he had acknowledged the pointlessness of staying in the lair anymore he had found that giving all of it up had proved impossible, even as she turned her back on it. So he had kitted out a space for himself there, steadily and patiently blocking off all forms of access apart from a hole broken into the ceiling – what had been the floor of her shop – and there he holed up. In some ways, it felt even safe. Safe to hiss and grunt at the pain in his arm, safe to let his body shake and his eyes grow hot and wet, safe to – sleep, to nod off. To nod out. To gently numb the bitter grip of what reality had become.

It was not something he could inflict upon her haven.

He dropped down into it now, the palm of his one hand pressed against the broken, uneven edge of the hole before letting go, his knees bending to absorb the shock of the landing. Here there was some colour, at least, not like the awful black and grey of the world outside. Colour he'd salvaged from the ruins left by the Shredder's methodical destruction of all he'd once known and loved. A brilliant yellow and orange rug, though much stained and grubby, hid the dirty cement beneath it. Vivid green plastic plants, unable to die, clustered up against the walls and a hundred different, chipped and broken ornaments in all colours and sizes and types were scattered amongst them. A big, bright pink My Little Pony stuffed toy, its seams bulging with the stuffing that kept its shape hulked in one corner. It was huge, that thing, the size of an actual pony and when he'd found it, in what had obviously once been the room of a little girl, he'd had to drape it over his shoulders in a fireman's hold to get it back. Colour like that, it didn't matter it was a girl's toy, though he wondered if the girl who'd owned it was still alive to miss it. The walls were papered in the torn out pages of the comic books he'd once so reverently kept wrapped in plastic, the bright and wild exploits of a hundred Super Heroes overlapping each other in a nonsensical pattern of stories. He paused to survey them now, his face still and without expression, and when he recalled his youthful enthusiasm over them it was like he was remembering another person. Something below his plastron felt hollow with his inability to connect with that former emotion, but it was replaced quickly by another roll of pain.

He kept the gear in an old painted tin chest next to the dusty rainbow of ripped cushions and moth-eaten blankets he used as a bed. The first flicker of urgency began as he flipped the lid open and began to lift each piece of equipment out, not prompted by the pain but by the sheer need that now quickened his movements and blotted out the drone of the world above him.

As though in anticipation, the pain began to hum more vibrantly, spreading up through his arm and down across his chest, shattering outwards to engulf his back, his other arm, to blister through his pelvis and legs, so that any pressure he placed upon his feet seemed to bite back, sending more waves of pain ricocheting upwards, meeting the flickering jabs that shot from the phantom limb. He cried out now, the papered walls swallowing the sound, and felt himself convulse, a violent twitch running through him so that he could do nothing but wait until it subsided.

His cheeks were wet when it did and he sat back upright hastily, moving quick before another attack could overwhelm him. It always seemed that the one just passed was absolutely the last one he could endure, that anything more would finish him off.

He had done this so many times that even one handed his movements were as sure and smooth as if he were wielding his _nunchuk_. The measure was poured, the water added and the Bunsen burner was lit, the flame lapping steadily at the base of the soda can he used. He removed the brace and the belt was looped around his bicep, he drawing it tight with his teeth, neck straining backwards.

He poised the syringe just above the twisted mass of scar tissue that finished his arm off, the sweat in his eyes blinding him momentarily, the strange animal taste of the leather belt on his tongue, the prick of the needle that no longer even registered as pain. He shot upwards, above the tourniquet, towards the heart, something Donatello had always told him he must never, ever do but which he felt he had no choice but to, in case the dose got lost in the sawn off tips of the veins that no longer pumped blood into his forearm. Even as he depressed the plunger he felt another brutal kick of agony begin and his anticipation swelled his chest so that it ached.

The brilliant white flare of the heroin raced forward to meet the pain, overwhelming it in one bright kiss. Replacing it instead with the softness of pleasure, caressing as warm sea water, spreading through him in one rolling burst that had him making an altogether different sort of moan. A guttural sound that was positively obscene and he sunk back against the nest of his bed, suddenly feeling so light-headed he thought his spirit might float upwards, leaving the contrasting increased heaviness of his body to slowly submerge into the pool of blankets.

His missing arm tingled, then vanished. It was gone. Truly gone. All that was left was a delicious pins and needles like a million tiny orgasms erupting all over his flesh and deep within it. Relief, deep and satisfying, soon joined in and he sighed outwards and released the belt from between his teeth, his hand dropping the syringe carelessly to the grimy threads of the sunset coloured rug.

When he did not show up later, April would know immediately it was one of Those Nights. They had started months apart at first but steadily they were creeping closer and closer together, and with that advance, more and more her quietly frantic concern pooled into understanding resignation. She would drop silently through the hole in his ceiling, step her way carefully through the ornaments and plastic plants to where he lay curled in the blankets, and gently wrap her body around his, her thin torso curving against his shell, her arm reaching over the bulk of him so that her fingertips could gently caress the stub of his lost arm. The only time she would dare to touch it.

Each time his eyes blinked it was more of an effort to open them again. The bliss was replaced with a numbness that was in some ways even more pleasurable than the ecstasy itself, for its absolute lack of sensation. His mouth lolled open, spittle collecting in one corner as he stared blankly at the wall opposite, where Silver Sentry, Stainless Steve Steel, Superman, Spiderman and the Green Lantern saved the world from one more ruthless villain hellbent on destroying it in a dozen conflicting depictions. Their colours, still bright beneath the film of grime that had covered them, began to run together as his vision blurred. Somewhere, in the back of his consciousness, the Turtle Titan rose beside those heroes, his red cape flickering in the wind as he hurtled toward the only villain that had proved unconquerable, on the cusp of delivering them all.

---

_The idea for this one is entirely credited to the marvellous **MT Angeli**, in a discussion that happened on **Stealthy Stories**. Go to 'Author's Info' then click the 'Back to Canon' thread. Page 5, I believe. My deep thanks and appreciation to her for allowing me to use it and it serves as her Birthday Gift, this month on the 26th. Hope you enjoy this, sweet pea:)_


	3. Raphael

**Until Yesterday Is Here**

He did not turn when she entered.

Instead he flicked his wrist and another blade went spinning through the air, hit the bullseye, nudging its brothers aside. They clustered there in the middle of the target, each vying for space, hurtled at such force they were embedded deep within the cracked wood.

"Brought food." She told him and he grunted. He could smell it. He already knew. "April packed it up for us, from the kitchens at her base, they take it in turns to – "

"Angel," he interrupted her, his voice brusque. "I know."

She fell silent and he felt a twinge of contrition at having spoken to her so harshly. But he said nothing. He heard the sounds of her scooping food out of whatever it was they'd used for packaging, into one of the chipped bowls they had salvaged, the chink of cutlery against porcelain. A moment later she spoke again. "April wishes you would come by more often."

But they both knew he didn't like to see what had become of April, how old she had grown and how hard. He still wanted to protect her and he couldn't. And above all, he hated being helpless.

She stepped around the battered old couch he slouched on, around on his left so that she remained out of his field of vision. He would have to turn his head to look at her with the eye he had left and she knew it.

He did not, just held out his hand silently for the bowl she placed in it.

The stew was watery, the vegetables in it hard and old, the meat stringy and tough. But the taste of food no longer seemed to matter. Its only purpose was to keep him going, give him enough energy that he could continue to train, to fight and to protect those who were left who mattered to him.

He ate robotically, shovelling the food into his mouth and chewing it into paste before swallowing, heard the shift of her body against fabric as she perched on the arm of the couch and listened to her chew on her own meal.

She took the bowl from him when they'd finished and took it back to the small alcove that laughably served as their kitchen. Then she hovered for a moment, behind him, and he knew she was arguing with herself whether or not to touch him, to place her hands on his shoulders or to stroke her fingertips over his skull.

"Come here." He growled the words, so difficult were they to say. But the way they brought her some small joy evident in the immediacy of her response relieved him.

She came around the couch and into his view and he put his hands on her hips and drew her down into his lap. She put her arms around his neck and pressed her face against his cheek. He lifted a hand and smoothed it over the stubble on her head, recalling the way the brilliant purple she used to dye her hair had given way to the shocking white-blonde of the bleach beneath it, that in turn bleeding out to reveal the dark black roots as time had passed and dying her hair had seemed unimportant. Not that there was any dye left to do it with. Then she had started shaving her head, deciding it was easier over all. Lice could be a problem.

His other hand ran down her arm, feeling the soft, slippery mess of burn scar tissue that almost completely covered the right side of her body. It knotted its way over her arm and around her neck, over her breast and ribcage, its expanse reaching even to encircle her back. He stroked it, feeling it give beneath his touch, frail and rice-paper thin, as unlike the healthy and intact skin of her left side as water to earth.

She sighed and grabbed his hand, moving it to her left breast, where the nerve endings were still whole, where she could still feel.

He remembered the wannabe punk brat who'd hovered around him shyly when they were kids the few times they'd hung out. How he hadn't known then, in his inexperience, what it meant when she would suddenly stalk off in a huff when he'd failed to respond to her tentative flirtations – simply out of sheer cluelessness and not the disinterest she imagined.

How she had risen to the challenge when the world began to change, joining forces with April to lead the almost amusing rebellion against the bleak horror that became reality; fighting for her body to heal against the burns she sustained in the first attempted uprising against the Shredder.

But he had not acted on that long denied attraction until the day years ago that she'd been caught alone without her patrol team. She'd been cornered by a particularly nasty trio of Foot Cops. Held by two while one indulged his sadism, methodically ripping out her piercings, one by one. Both ears. The eyebrow. The nostril. The lip. The labret. The blood had been viscous and never-ending, an almost-black tide that streamed down her face and onto her chest as she'd struggled not to cry out. He was patrolling nearby when finally she could not be silent anymore and her scream had echoed through the streets.

He'd killed them slowly.

Calmly breaking limbs as methodically as they'd removed those piercings, before inflicting wounds that would lazily but steadily leak blood until they were finally died.

And when he was done it seemed simply natural to take her home with him.

He hadn't realised until she was in his arms how much he had needed the comfort.

Now, as she undressed he pressed his face to her neck and breathed in deeply. She smelt of sweat and smoke, of need and desire, and of Leonardo.

He had always known, of course. How could he not? The smell of his brother was as familiar to him as the feel of his _sai _gripped in his fists. She had never said anything, had never needed to. He knew, and she knew that he knew, and that it didn't matter.

Once, sometimes twice a week, she would disappear inexplicably and when she returned she would smell of his long estranged brother and they would both ignore it and continue on as they had for almost fifteen years now.

He used to wonder if it was love, or charity, or some more wholly selfish need within herself that prompted her to go to Leonardo. Perhaps Leo showed her affection he himself could not. Nowadays, he didn't bother to think about it. She always came back to him and he figured that was all that really counted. He had never once wondered which of them she preferred. That seemed as immaterial as the sunlight on the barren park now did.

She straddled him, pressed a kiss against the side of his mouth and her fingertips danced over the sewn-shut lid that covered the gaping hole of his eye-socket. It tingled.

"You're beautiful." He told her and lifted a hand to gently trace the messy scar that split her lip and down her chin; then its sisters on the soft skin of her nose and cutting through one dark eyebrow. She smiled at him, the stubble on her shaved head softly glittering in the dull light, her scarred right breast shrunken and collapsed against her chest. He wrapped an arm around her back and one beneath her rear and lifted her, laying her carefully back against the couch cushions as though she might break if he dropped her.

Ha. No chance. His Angel was one tough cookie.

But he still couldn't resist and he thought she appreciated it, the way she reached up for him.

Her scent deepened in strength, became more sweetly pungent. Skimming on top of it like foam was Leonardo's, made more powerful by the increased intensity of hers. He breathed them both in and thought of his brother, his best friend, his betrayer and most brutal enemy.

How could he object to Angel being with Leonardo when it meant she brought this back with her, this faint and lingering scent? The proof his brother still lived. The recollection of his friendship, his support and his need. Their playful conspiracies. The childish games giving way to adolescent sparring matches. The words they had said to each other, so many cruel and too few loving. Like a lock of hair, or a photograph this odour was, eliciting a thousand poignant memories of a time when they would sooner have died for each other, even as he made love to the woman they shared, who in her own pain had favoured them as remnants from a happier time rather than turn to men of her own kind.

Instead he felt simply grateful. It was, after all, all that he had left of his brother.


	4. Leonardo

**Until Yesterday Is Here**

He never went to that part of the park.

There just didn't seem any need to. His Sensei, his Father, was long gone. All that remained, if indeed there remained anything, was only dust and bone. To persist in visiting that symbolic marker was to indulge in some pointless ritual of clinging to the past, of what once was. What was no longer.

He'd escorted Angel half-way, as he always did, though she always protested she would be fine. And then, as always, he turned into the cracked and empty streets, once home to the most motley, thriving and unpredictable population in the world, and began his patrol.

He did not work in cohesion with April's teams in his efforts. He ignored them, for the most part, moving to different parts of the city whenever he came across them. They were more than capable in their reconnaissance and sabotage and did not require his help. April he visited only when he realised it had been too long between the last time and she would soon start resigning herself to the fact of his death. It was always so strange and surreal to leave the old library and go walking through the streets with her, like he was moving through the motions by route. They would head towards the edge of the river where they would sit and talk on a rooftop, staring out across the toxic water no one would risk going into anymore, not even to save another. Those who fell in were dead whether or not they were fished out, anyway.

He always visited her at a time they could watch the sun set or rise, tirelessly travelling until they got to the necessary spot. They were the last beautiful spectacles left to the city and it seemed right that he share them with her even if the ritual served no useful purpose; the beautiful wash of reds and oranges, complemented by extra dashes of pinks in the mornings and purples with the evening. In the softness of that light, she did not look so old nor so hard, her features made gentle by the warm, lovely glow of the sun's new birthed or last breathing rays. By day, its brightness was too pitiless, too easy to remember how many millions of miles away it was and whilst it continued to blaze, unchanging and uncaring, things down there on Earth relentlessly decayed and fell apart. That is, when it peeked through the endless barrage of noxious black smoke the Shredder's factories spewed into the sky.

These days his knees hurt so much it made moving along the rooftops more than a little difficult. But some last gasping remnant of pride drove him to continue doing it, remembering the proud and arrogant strength of his young body as it had so effortlessly swung and flipped and leapt, as deliriously moving him forward as it now doggedly did.

But remembering those times was pointless, too. They were over now, long gone and left behind.

All that mattered now, _was_ now.

Like his _ninjaken_ arcing through the air, severing the wires that fed the speakers, silencing Karai's monotonous recorded dictates mid-word, as abruptly as if he'd cut her very throat. The _shuriken_ hissing across the street to crack the giant screens, splintering them into sputtering, crackling blank expanses of grey; raining sparks from their torn insides

They replaced them of course. His task was a never-ending one; constantly doubling back on itself and overlapping, an endless looping cycle of slashing and destroying only to come back to the same spot and do it all over again. Pointless, really. But he kept on doing it. Perhaps because it was the only thing he could do.

Perhaps because he was just petty and vindictive at the end of it all.

He paused beneath a twisted jumble of neon jutting out from the shell of a former porn shop and felt his shoulders sag downwards, the wind tickling the scars that stretched over his skull and down his face. Overhead, bilious grey clouds clustered together, signalling rain. He could smell it then, something that still smelled somehow fresh and clean – he would wait for the storm, and he sat down on a pile of rubble and ignored the twinge in his shoulder.

Perhaps because he couldn't acknowledge his own pointlessness in this bruised and heartbroken world.

It was getting harder to train, though he still did it, every day, exactly as his Father had taught him, exactly in the way his Father had praised him. But each and every day was an effort to begin at all. The quiet, repetitive sabotage of the Shredder's psychological warfare was as much an excuse to stay in shape as some pretence at a purpose.

"You are old, Leonardo." He froze at the sound of that voice, the one he heard constantly, echoing all around him in the macabre streets. This was no recording, though. "Do not make me do this."

He felt the cold sting of steel through the long black coat he wore, pressing down on his shoulder. He remembered a time, long ago, when every encounter with her had been exciting, a thrill that had him sleepless with guilt and struggling to hide it from his family. Now he just felt tired.

"You are old too, Karai." He replied and oddly, his voice sounded the same as it always did, though he used it so rarely these days.

He whipped around faster than he thought he still could and met her blade with his own, taking her off balance with the force of his blow.

But he had no intention of continuing the fight. He'd just been stopping her, automatically, as he always did.

He let his arm fall by his side, the blade pointed modestly towards the cement, straggling weeds growing up through the cracks in the wretched persistence of life. He raised his eyes to look at her, knowing his gaze was masked beneath the dark glasses. She didn't seem to have aged at all, apart from the fact her hair was now silver. No, carrying out the Shredder's horrendous brutality had not worn her down the way fighting against it had done to April. Karai was still beautiful, strong and composed, her grip on her weapon sure and steady.

He looked her over and realised suddenly how ridiculous it was, how it always had been, the childish attraction he'd had to her. The desperate desire to see her redeemed, the faith that she could be – that she would be. The excuses he'd made for her. Pointless, in the end. Utterly.

When he turned and walked away from her, she did nothing.

He disappeared into the maze of gutted and torn apart buildings that were the streets of Manhattan just as the rain begin to spatter down; fat, hot drops on his scarred head and shoulders, heedless of the Foot Patrol Ships and Utrominators that choked the skies above him. The streets were no longer lit at night; he had only to hide when they swept the space around him. Otherwise there was no point to stealth.

The rain steadily picked up pace, those few drops quickly turning into hundreds, heavily pattering down all over and around him. It felt sweet and he removed his glasses and tipped his neck back to feel the warm wetness run down his face in something that resembled enjoyment. In another time he may have sat down in the storm and meditated, but meditation was yet another exercise that seemed pointless these days. What good was inner peace when the entire world was corrupted, when there was never a chance of opening his eyes to find what he felt inside reflected there? So he'd just stopped.

Now and then he wondered what Splinter might've thought, to see him now. But Splinter was dead, so there was really no reason to wonder.

Raphael thought that he'd given up when they'd lost Splinter. His brother could not have known Leonardo had given up long before that. He had stopped mourning his Father many, many years ago. There was something else that continued to haunt him; that continued to drive home his utter inability to fulfil the duty he'd been trained to do – to protect the family. That hung over his head like the proverbial Sword of Damocles, or clung upon him like a brand, marking him as the scars on his face did – that made everything else seem so completely pointless in the wake of its simple reality.

Raphael was right. He was a failure. But not because of Splinter's death. No, long ago he had accepted the inevitability of that loss. It was the other one he had failed to hold onto. Had failed to find. Had failed to bring back. And in that failure, he had to acknowledge that everything he'd done to lead and protect them, to hold them together, had been irreparably useless, or else it would never have happened.

He had failed them all when Donatello had left.


End file.
